This is hacker public radio episode 4125 for Friday the 24th of May 2024.
Today's show is entitled, installing home assistant operating system HALS on X8664 machine.
It is part of the series' home automation.
It is hosted by Ken Fallen and is about 12 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, method 1 installing HALS via Ubuntu booting from a USB flash drive.
To a generic X8664 PC.
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallen and you're listening to another episode of Hacker
Public Radio.
Today is going to be the second in our series about home automation, the first being
HPR4099 introducing home automation and we were talking about home assistant today.
We are going to install home assistant for you and we're going to do that live basically.
Let's see how we're going to do that.
On the home assistant installation page, there are various different options available
for you to install home assistant and again home assistant is your central hub.
It's the one that's going to do the brains behind all your automations.
It's going to take in information from sensors and do things with us as you desire.
The easiest by far the easiest way to get up and running with a home assistant hub is
to buy the home assistant green product which is the hardware device that's pretty much
guaranteed to run.
The next option would be DIY using a Raspberry Pi which I intend to do an episode on as
all.
The next level would be with the home assistant DLO which again is a computer module
based on the Raspberry Pi and is produced in conjunction with the home assistant community.
So we will not be installing it on a no-droid device but we will in fact be installing
us on x8664 machine using this expert method here.
Then there's expert methods which will make me not get to a series if you want to send
a show using that that's absolutely fine.
We'll probably stick to these methods here to get us up and running initially as I said
I'm no home assistant expert.
I'm just getting into it and this is me documenting my journey so to speak.
So I'm going to be installing it on a HP T610 flexible thin client and the reason I'm doing
that is because I have one of them and it is the only available x86 at clients that I have
right at this moment in time so therefore that's the one we're going to use.
It's a bit finicky.
I got them during the lockdown when there was a shortage of Raspberry Pi 4s and a few things
that I needed to do specifically. I need to drive to printers and the printer definition
files and all the stuff is only available on i3806 platform so therefore that's why I got those.
They're kind of the same equivalent power as a Raspberry Pi 4, a little bit
under but I have been able to upgrade the memory into 16 gigabytes and there's 16 gigabytes on
board flash as well and there's also space to attach an ID drive which I haven't bothered doing
because 16 gigs is more than enough. I include a link to information about the hardware and
just want to reinforce the fact that I do not, I do not recommend this harder for you
because when I was doing this the UEFI boot set up of this computer is out of date with the
majority of the modern distros so as a result you need to disable that before anything else.
So when you want to install home assistant you click on the tutorial and you get brought to
their home assistant install page which is the generic dash x8664 page and the first thing they
tell you to do as well is you need to disable UEFI boot because they do not support it.
It becomes an internet appliance and they give you some examples there in the documentation about how to
how to do that. Then they go on to say how to install home assistant to us or HALS
as the abbreviation they use on your x86 harder and they provide two methods. So the first method
is the one we're going to be covering but I just want to explain the other method which is
option two. An option two is to open up turn off your target PC where you're going to be installing
home assistant on. Take out the hard drive physically put it into a USB caddy device or something
and attach it to your laptop or PC and basically flash it as you would in SD card if you are
trying to burn raspberry pie. You put in use etcher or something like that or DD even and you simply
burn the image onto the disk. So a home assistant do as itself doesn't come with any way to install
so it doesn't have an installer program. So what it suggests is doing it that way and then when you
have a burned the image you take on mount of the course from your current system take out the
disk reinstall those game and turn it back on and then it will boot into the appliance and you will
get a web page and we're only going to take you as far as getting the web page today and then
we will go on to the next episode so set your expectations right there. So the first thing that I'll do
is read the instructions which is always good so method one you have a target computer so you install
the USB flash drive. So what they're want you to do here is they are asking you to install the
alive Linux distro and the one they select is Ubuntu. So you download the image for Ubuntu live.
You burn us using etcher, blatcher or DD or something or fedora, media writer, whatever works for you
onto a USB stick I've got a 64 gig one here and then you turn off your target computer once you
finish burning it. Same way you would do an SD card for a Raspberry Pi again and then you would turn
off your target computer booters off the USB stick. Once it's booted off the USB stick you then go to
the web page to download the image so you're running inside the live environment be that Ubuntu,
be that fedora, be a deviant, deviant's the one that I actually used because for some reason
well under I think didn't run and the only thing I could get working was a deviant machine.
So strange though it may be deviant it was for the win and I clicked on the link to download the image
so inside your live environment you go to the home assistant page again you go to installation
generic x86-64 and then step five of method one has download the image which is github.com
home assistant operating system releases download 12.2 HALS on score generic dash x86-64 dash
dash 2 dot i mg dot x z now by the time you're listening to this that may have moved on so
you pick the latest image and once it's downloaded under Ubuntu at the bottom left you can go
disks and then there's a section three dots where you can restore disk image so you would highlight
the disk that you want to install it on so you know your main slash dev slash whatever
and then you would select the image that you want and then you start restoring and it will confirm
that it's restored and then you would remove the image and that is pretty much that how I did
as on the Ubuntu or on the deviant image myself was I installed the USB stick turned on the computer
booted to a live environment and then I actually opened up a terminal and I installed
open SSH dash server started the server found my IP address and secured shell from my own PC
into that server because the keyboard and my PC here is a lot better than that one
then I installed WGET and then I used WGET to pull down the image and once I had the image
installed I used LSBLK to tell me what the file systems were and in my case I ignored the ones
that had loop zero because that's where the file system is mounted and I also ignored slash live
mount anything with live in it which happened to be SDB and that left only SDA1 which was 16
gig which matched what was in the BIOS and then I just used the DD device where I used the IF which is
the infile pointing to the HAA or S generic image dot XZ space or F equals for slash dev for
slash SDA and that took a while to do and it rolled 319 megabytes of data and when I was done
I rebooted the system and by the big I was able to connect to that IP address on port
8123 and that is it that is how you install home assistant as a device on an X86 computer
tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio
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